Week 6 / Thing 14: Technorati & Tagging

I searched for “School Library Learning 2.0” in blogs and in tags. The first time I searched blogs, I found the RAW site, the second time, I got no results: interesting. When I searched tags, I got 11 results. Interestingly enough several were links to blogs from participants of the original Web 2.0 class, 3 were for bikini girls from Japan, and the rest I only found mildly interesting. There were quite a few videos to browse. Clicking on Web 2.0 in the directory yielded many blogs.


I looked at blogging central and browsed the top few of the top 100 by authority. The Huffington Report was number 1? I didn't expect that at all. Many of the other top blogs focus on technology of one kind or another, and that didn't surprise me at all. I would think that many people go to the internet for information on technology since it tends to be the most up-to-date.

Boing Boing (number 1 by popularity) is like reading the headlines on the magazines in line at the grocery store: sort of fun with a little guilt mixed in; you know you'd never buy the things, but what's the harm in reading them? And I think Boing Boing is more legit. It's number 5 in the top 100 by authority.

The top tags were an interesting mix, and I'm not surprised that sex and technology are both there as well as Eva Longoria.

The internet is this big unruly mix of everthing, and tags reflect that. As a librarian, my tendency would be to want to standardize it all, but I know that even if the tags are all standardized, the quality of a search depends on the search terms. I can't even remember how to search WWII in our catalog, how can we expect millions of internet users to become standardized? So tagging is a good thing, but only as good as guessing what terms people will use to search.

I decided not to claim this blog.